


Two Women Walk Into A Bar

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 14:45:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3138131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Almost all they have in common is really great hair. (Almost.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Women Walk Into A Bar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaresu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/gifts).



            “I like your hair,” said the woman at Biers.

 

            “Thank you,” Agnes said, casting a critical eye at the scumble Igor had served her. It had nothing on Nanny Ogg’s. It was really just slightly vinegary cider. Ah, well, and she had felt so _daring_ while ordering it. “I’m told I have a lovely personality as well.”

 

            The woman’s eyebrows shot up, and her hair waved gently in the non-existent breeze. Agnes wondered if she dyed the eyebrows black, or if, unlike her hair, they were naturally that colour. “Do they say that before or after they’ve heard you sing? I saw you, at the Opera.”

 

            “How?” Agnes said, looking up sharply. “They hid me all the time.”

 

            The woman smiled without humour. Her dark eyes were very opaque. “Not from people who looked closely.”

 

            Agnes was a witch, and like most witches, she got a sense of when she ought to stop asking questions for her own safety; unlike almost every other witch except (by and large) Queen Magrat, she obeyed it. She looked down at her scumble again. “Oh.” She looked up at the bar, and the bottles arrayed on the shelves. “You’re familiar, somehow.”

 

            “We’ve probably met before,” the woman said. “You’re a witch, aren’t you?”

 

            Agnes eyed her carefully. It was still not always safe to say you were a witch, even if you were Agnes, who had got round the problem by being jolly and inoffensive, feeding people sweeties, and temporarily succumbing to the impulse to say ‘poot!’ when she really meant ‘fuck!’ That Agnes. Great hair, lovely personality. Harmless.

 

            Well, mostly harmless.

 

            “Agnes Nitt,” she said at last. “From Lancre. And yes, I am a witch.”

 

            “Susan Sto Helit,” the woman said. “From Sto Helit.” She smiled, and there was a cold but not unfeeling implacability to it that Agnes recognised with a jolt. Oh yes, they’d met before. Agnes had been at births that had gone too wrong to be salvaged, when livestock were too ill to save, when children took sick in the night, and – he wasn’t _always_ a skeleton, was he, now? Not always. Agnes had been near-delirious with exhaustion that night, Milly Tockley’s twins taking a long time to be born and killing their poor mother as they went, and it hadn’t been a skeleton she’d bargained with for Milly’s life. It had been a slender woman her own age, wrapped in a black cloak, her white hair a formless mass, her eyes burning unearthly blue and her cheek scarred.

 

            Susan smiled. “Think of me as the understudy.”

 


End file.
